The Invite Review: Plays With Knives

If you decide summer sex comedy The Invite is not to your taste, other flavors are available. There’s the 2020 original, Spanish filmmaker Cesc Gay’s Sentimental, followed by another half-dozen iterations from around the globe, including Germany, the Czech Republic, and South Korea. I can’t speak to their quality; what I am qualified to report is that this late-to-the-party American version may be the funniest movie you see this summer. 

May be: Your tolerance for watching a husband and wife snipe at each other has to be pretty high. Also pretty high: Adjunct professor Joe (Seth Rogen), who is using copious amounts of weed to cope with his debilitating back pain, a disappointing music career, and a marriage that is by all appearances in its death throes. At first glance, wife Angela (Olivia Wilde, who also directs) seems far more put-together, as she roams San Francisco in preparation for a dinner party, all boho-chic at the deli counter and hugging an expensive plant. It’s only as we get to know her, and her sad, nonstarter relationship with her husband, that we begin to understand how much of her life is performative, and how hungry she is to be seen. Lesser considered as an actress, Wilde plays this stricken woman beautifully.  

But where’s the humor in that, huh?, you may be wondering. In fact, you hear Rogen’s distinctive huh-huh-huh – a laugh like Beavis by way of Woody Allen – before you see him, and Wilde the director is mining bemusing sight gags – Rogen wrestling a foldable bike – before anybody speaks. Once the dialogue kicks in, the script, by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, exhibits a surgically sharp ear for the American millennial condition: the therapy speak, the anxious attention to projecting progressive values, dashed hopes redirected into home renovation. When their slightly older, and definitely less inhibited, upstairs neighbors Piña (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton), arrive for dinner, there’s plenty comedy (a lot of cringe) in the differences between the two couples: one ludicrously sexy and at ease, the other openly seething and hanging on by their fingernails. 

Jones and McCormack similarly profiled a couple that probably shouldn’t be together in their 2012 downer-divorce-charmer Celeste & Jesse Forever, but frankly that film was warm cookies and cold milk compared to the acid bath of The Invite. It’s tricky making a movie about marital discord, because you want the couple to be at sufficient loggerheads that you understand why they’re inches from divorce, but you also don’t want them to be so toxic you can’t stand to spend two hours with them. The filmmakers and fully committed cast never shy from how bad things have gotten between Joe and Angela, but they find the sweet spot in so much sourness, while the slashing-strings score by Devonté Hynes (aka Blood Orange) sets the playfully-knives-out tone perfectly. 

Shrugging off her last film, the misguided Don’t Worry Darling, this is for Wilde a return to form – to the comedy instincts and the clarity of purpose – of her debut, Booksmart. The purpose here? Laugh to keep from crying.

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This article appears in July 3 • 2026.